University Channel just posted a couple of panel discussions from Columbia University about Afghanistan.  The panels took place in April and are titled “The Obama Administration Faces Afghanistan“.  I’m going through them now and they appear to be quite good and broken down into easily digested parts of about 15-30 minutes each.

Kimberly Marten’s intro to the FATA is worth watching in order to understand some of the complexities and myths about the area.

Other topics include:

• India’s role in Afghanistan and Indo-Pakistani conflict as a driver for Afghan instability
• The U.S. policy review process during the transition between administrations

I have to admit, I’m still shocked that people, fellow Americans, don’t get that torturing people is wrong.  They’ll squirm and wiggle away from using the word and invent bogus euphemisms (enhanced interrogations!), attempt to rationalize their beliefs (‘They’d do it to us!’) or ignore evidence that it does not produce credible intelligence to make themselves feel better but the bottom line is they do not have a moral problem with torturing another human being.

So this article in the Washington Post today is not surprising but it is still disturbing:

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

And yet, there are still people in this country to adhere to the circular logic of the President and Vice-President:

“President Bush and Vice President Cheney have said that interrogations never involved torture. “The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values,” Bush asserted on Sept. 6, 2006…”

Yes, ‘Americans don’t torture because it’s against the law and our values, therefore anything we do must be something other than torture.’

Can you imagine that line being used in other places?  ‘Your honor, my client couldn’t have murdered the victim because murder is against the law and our values.  Defense rests.’  Ah…an airtight case.

I’m not naive enough to believe that this outrage was the sole product of the current administration.  For every collaborator you need many more bystanders who do nothing even though they should know better.  This is how good people allow evil to flourish.

“I like Bush. He made America weak.”

Taxi driver in Amman, Jordan. Dec. 8 2008

Here are my initial thoughts on the Global Trends 2025 report that many have been talking about recently (assuming you’re a policy geek).

First, I’m not thrilled with the idea that NIC continually gets to produce documents about events that occur two decades in the future. Would it tax the system too much to have several, parallel assessments going on simultaneously? For example, the last report, written in 2004, was designed to predict what the world would be like in 2020. Why couldn’t they continue writing assessments of 2020 at regular (5 year?) intervals. It seems to me that having estimates done of the world 5, 10, 15, and 20 years out could be quite helpful.

Why would this be important?

Early in the report the authors compare it to the previous one. They say:

The most dramatic difference between Mapping the Global Future: Report of the Intelligence
Council’s 2020 Project and Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World is the latter’s
assumptions of a multipolar future, and therefore dramatic changes in the international system.
The 2025 report describes a world in which the US plays a prominent role in global events, but
the US is one among many global actors who manage problems. In contrast, the 2020 report
projects continued US dominance, positing that most major powers have forsaken the idea of
balancing the US.

Now, that’s a pretty big change and while it’s great they tell us that there is a change I think it might be more important to know why that change occurred.  Why did the intelligence community see the future of the world so differently than they do today?  How might this altered view affect how the world will look in 2020?

Without such a process of evaluating old predictions, assessments of such distant horizons risk becoming a way to project current concerns into the far future.  We can’t just take the current headlines and try to fast-forward 25 years with them.  After all, 25 years ago (1983) I’m guessing an assessment like this would be talking about the threat of Soviet expansionism and communism in Latin America.  Are either of those a concern today?  It would be nice, therefore, to see some imaginative thinking or, at least, some explanation about how they came to the conclusions they write about.  I’ll have to see how they do as I delve deeper into the document.

What immediately came to mind was the fact the the first report was published around the time of the reelection of George W. Bush and, coincidentally (?) seems to reflect his worldview.  A dominant U.S. for the foreseeable future?  Energy supplies “sufficient to meet global demand”?

Meanwhile, the current report has a much more ‘Obama’-like feel to it.  The world will be multipolar (do I hear coalitions, anyone?), adoption of alternative energy sources will be critical, perhaps everyone in the world doesn’t want a Western style, liberal democracy.

The authors really need to explain their thought process so they can avoid appearing to be a bunch of self serving toadies looking to keep their cushy government jobs.

The authors do say that making predictions so far out is a tricky business and I’m certainly not knocking them for making the wrong predictions (we won’t know for 20 years) but rather the lack of clarity of how they came to their decision and why they think events of the last four years have fundimentally changed how the world will work 20 years from now.

Ok, I’m not particularly qualified to discuss this issue but that’s the beauty of blogging.

There’s certainly been a lot of press over the past month or two about the Somali pirates who are running amok.

The Indians just blew up a ‘mothership‘ (hopefully E.T. got away) but it doesn’t sound like anyone has much hope this will have any long term effect on the problem.

This article (H/T State Failure Blog) tries to address some of the underlying issues fueling the problem (and this one from MSNBC), and there are lots of them.

• The ocean is too big
• Nobody wants to pony up the lion’s share of resources to patrol the area more effectively
• There hasn’t been a plan of what to do with the pirates
• The lack of a functioning government on land means there’s no enforcement coming from that side of the equation

“The American military’s solution has been to advise ships to hire private security. But many in the shipping industry have been reluctant, fearing armed guards will prompt increased violence from pirates.”

Blackwater is reported to be sending a ship out there to do escort duty but I’m not sure why the U.S. military can’t take a more proactive approach.

Would it be that expensive or resource intensive to create a small fleet of ‘Q ships‘?  Buy some old merchant ships, outfit them with some arms, good radar/sonar/reconnaissance capabilities, lure the pirates to them and blast them out of the water.  I’m sure you’d have marines knocking each other over to volunteer for that duty.

What am I missing to explain why this isn’t a good idea?

Nir Rosen writes a brilliant, if disturbing, article in Rolling Stone after embedding with the Taliban.  It goes a long way towards showing how you can be ahead by 4 touchdowns at halftime but if you don’t show up for the second half of the game, you’ll still lose (ok, that’s my limit on sports metaphors for the rest of the year).

By May 2003, only 18 months after the beginning of the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld all but declared victory in Afghanistan. “We are at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction,” Rumsfeld announced during a visit to Kabul. The security situation in Afghanistan, in his view, was better than it had been for 25 years.

I was in Afghanistan at this time.  I remember there was a lot of talk about transitioning to away from combat operations to reconstruction.  The big rumor among the rank and file in the mess hall was that ’soon’ we wouldn’t have to carry our weapons and that the Department of Defense would soon withdraw hazardous duty pay from troops serving in Afghanistan since there was no threat there anymore (!).  I wasn’t quite that optimistic but I certainly could see the possibility of transitioning to an environment more similar to Kosovo or Bosnia than Iraq.

Ten months later, as I was getting ready to leave Afghanistan I was much more pessimistic.  I saw a complete lack of progress and interest in addressing Afghanistan’s problems and saw my time there essentially as a ‘time out’ allowing the Taliban and other anti-coalition elements to get their shit together.

The Pentagon, already focused on invading Iraq, assumed that the Afghan militias it had bought with American money would be enough to secure the country. Instead, the militias proved far more interested in extorting bribes and seizing land than pursuing the hardened Taliban veterans who had taken refuge across the border in Pakistan. The parliamentary elections in 2005 returned power to the warlords who had terrorized the countryside before the Taliban imposed order. “The American intervention issued a blank check to these guys,” says a senior aid official in Kabul. “They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them. But the warlords never abandoned their bad habits — they’re abusing people and filling their pockets.

The thinking in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 was definitely short term.  While there were programs nominally designed to disarm the militias and take power away from warlords, those programs were undermined by commanders who viewed those militia leaders as important for keeping the peace.  While I can’t speak for the entire theater, I did have the opportunity to view decision making close up at one command (brigade command equivalent)  and thinking and planning never extended beyond the end of the tour we were on.  Questions about long term effects, fulfilling the superior commanders intent, or trying to apply any sort of counterinsurgency principles were dismissed out of hand.   Rather, the priority was keeping the natives calm on our watch.  That generally involved paying off militia leaders and local warlords through work contracts on post, granting them exclusive access to sell goods to military personnel through a bazaar (a very lucrative trade), and turning a blind eye to widespread extortion of local workers as they left the base.  All of these things eroded support among the local population and created the impression that we viewed these warlords as allies.  The local warlords used that impression to keep local villagers obedient by threatening to call down American air strikes on anyone who opposed them.  The warlords had no such pull with us but it didn’t help to see Americans visiting these warlords, kowtowing to them and distributing U.S. taxpayer largess through them.

God willing, he adds, it will take no more than 30 years to rid Afghanistan of foreigners.

Read that again.  It’s not just propaganda.  No one has ever adequately explained what war means today.  Yes, it was called ‘The Long War’ for awhile but before all this began, no senior person (like the president) ever sat down and told the American people ‘Look, we’re going to be at this for a generation or two.  That means we might have tens of thousands of soldiers fighting and dying for twenty, forty or more years.  That’s what we’re in for.’  Instead we got a whole bunch of ‘hoo-ah’ nonsense that set expectations way too high.

Unfortunately for us, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, et. al. don’t think in terms of election cycles or fiscal quarters.  They can (and do) think in terms of years, decades, and generations.  If we aren’t prepared to stick it out, we should just cut our losses now and be done with it.

“…Parwan province, which borders Kabul to the north, has also become dangerous. “All of a sudden we see IEDs on the main road in Parwan and attacks on police checkpoints,” the intelligence officer says. “It’s the last remaining key arterial route connecting Kabul to the rest of the country.”

This is the most personally distressing part of the article for me.  It may be silly but I spent my entire tour in Parwan province and spent a lot of time in the villages, on the roads, and meeting the people there and have a fond regard for the place.  The people of Parwan were so exhausted by warfare and so positive about our presence there that I find it difficult to think about there being a prevalent threat there.  In the dozens of times I left the wire, I can think of only a handful where I felt the threat was sufficient for me to wear my kevlar helmet.

In 2003/2004, everyone still wanted to get into a shooting war and (at least it seemed like) no one wanted to try to win the war we were in.  So, I had a string of motivated NCOs from various units come into my office asking ‘Where can we get into a fight?  Where can we kill some Taliban?’  I remember one XO of a marine battalion tell me ‘You guys in the Army can deal with that hearts and mind bullshit.  We’re here to kill people.’

Now, I’m not saying that was wrong.  Our military needs people who want to go out and risk their lives to blow stuff up and ‘kick some ass’.  I think it’s been pretty well established, however, that relying exclusively on such a mindset or strategy isn’t going to do us a whole lot of good.  Some of us knew that we needed to look towards a further horizon in 2003/2004 and lay some groundwork to prevent the Taliban and others from finding fertile ground for a comeback.  Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of people interested.

This is the price for six years of neglect.

“You Westerners have your watches,” the leader observed. “But we Taliban have time.”

There are two National Intelligence Estimates floating around in draft form, one about Afghanistan and one about Iraq.  The NIEs are classified but people are leaking the jist of them…and it ain’t good.

Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral”

…the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence by militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan.

…unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year.

The findings of the intelligence estimate appear to be reflected in recent statements by Army Gen. David Petraeus, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, who has called the situation “fragile” and “reversible” and said he will never declare victory there. (emphasis added)

The biggest piece of nonsense peddled about Iraq is that we can achieve some sort of VE/VJ day type of ‘victory with honor’.  Neither Iraq or Afghanistan are going to become free, secular, Western style democracies.  With Iraq we need to figure out what we want to acomplish already and work towards that.  My ‘off the cuff’ suggestions:

1. Prevent al-Qaeda from establishing havens in the Western part of the country
2. Prevent Iran from turning Iraq into a client state
3. Keep the Kurds from starting a regional conflict

Those are things we can do without running our military and economy in the ground.  There’s very little evidence to support the idea that we can turn Iraq’s kleptocracy into a functioning democracy.  We’ve overseen a rough segregation of Iraqi society along sectarian/ethnic lines which can avoid a major bloodbath so long as all the players keep to their corners (that’s a really big ‘if’).

Oh…one thing both of these reports agreed upon:

U.S. officials familiar with the new National Intelligence Estimate said they were unsure when the top-secret report would be completed and whether it would be published before the Nov. 4 presidential election.

Wow…what a shocker.

Yet again, J. over at the Armchair Generalist beat me to a post I wanted to write about the discussion in the last presidential debate about what an Obama or McCain Doctrine might look like.  I won’t retread old ground but thought that these two pieces (written in the last week of September) complement the candidates’ answers quite well.

The Stratfor article puts the Democratic view of foreign policy into a broader historical context by saying:

Thus, the main thrust of the Democratic tradition is deeply steeped in fighting wars, but approaches this task with four things in mind:

1. Wars should not begin until the last possible moment and ideally should be initiated by the enemy.
2. Wars must be fought in a coalition with much of the burden borne by partners.
3. The outcome of wars should be an institutional legal framework to manage the peace, with the United States being the most influential force within this multilateral framework.
4. Any such framework must be built on a trans-Atlantic relationship.

It’s funny but once I saw these it became clear why I had such a warm and fuzzy feeling about a potential Obama foreign policy.  My personal prefereces stick very close to these.  In fact, it would be nice to see principles like this formally accepted by Obama.  They’re clear, easily understandable and pretty darn hard to argue with.

Now, the debate answers:

Brokaw: Sen. Obama, let me ask you if — let’s see if we can establish tonight the Obama doctrine and the McCain doctrine for the use of United States combat forces in situations where there’s a humanitarian crisis, but it does not affect our national security. Take the Congo, where 4.5 million people have died since 1998, or take Rwanda in the earlier dreadful days, or Somalia. What is the Obama doctrine for use of force that the United States would send when we don’t have national security issues at stake?

Obama: Well, we may not always have national security issues at stake, but we have moral issues at stake. If we could have intervened effectively in the Holocaust, who among us would say that we had a moral obligation not to go in? If we could’ve stopped Rwanda, surely, if we had the ability, that would be something that we would have to strongly consider and act. So when genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening somewhere around the world and we stand idly by, that diminishes us. And so I do believe that we have to consider it as part of our interests, our national interests, in intervening where possible. But understand that there’s a lot of cruelty around the world. We’re not going to be able to be everywhere all the time. That’s why it’s so important for us to be able to work in concert with our allies. Let’s take the example of Darfur just for a moment. Right now there’s a peacekeeping force that has been set up and we have African Union troops in Darfur to stop a genocide that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. We could be providing logistical support, setting up a no-fly zone at relatively little cost to us, but we can only do it if we can help mobilize the international community and lead. And that’s what I intend to do when I’m president.

You can clearly see the influence of Samantha Power who was unfortunately dropped from the campaign due to a comment made about Hillary Clinton.  Still, it’s nice to see the ideas remain behind and there’s hope she’ll return after November 4th.  Too often intervention is seen as an either/or proposition.  Send in the Marines and take the place over or ignore it and hope it all works out in the end.  This position is more nuanced and allows for a broad spectrum of alternatives based on capability and political will.

Ideally, some sort of inclusion of the possiblity of military action in cases of ‘moral’ necessity in the guiding principles would be great so that we don’t just blunder around picking and choosing what we do randomly but I’m sure any attmepts to do so would be much more controversial.

Regarding war in general (from the Stratfor article):

Responding to attack rather than pre-emptive attack, coalition warfare and multinational postwar solutions are central to Obama’s policy in the Islamic world. He therefore straddles the divide within the Democratic Party. He opposes the war in Iraq as pre-emptive, unilateral and outside the bounds of international organizations while endorsing the Afghan war and promising to expand it.

This view on multilateralism and NATO is summed up in a critical statement by Obama in a position paper:

“Today it’s become fashionable to disparage the United Nations, the World Bank, and other international organizations. In fact, reform of these bodies is urgently needed if they are to keep pace with the fast-moving threats we face. Such real reform will not come, however, by dismissing the value of these institutions, or by bullying other countries to ratify changes we have drafted in isolation. Real reform will come because we convince others that they too have a stake in change — that such reforms will make their world, and not just ours, more secure.

The article goes on to say that getting Europe to engage and pony up would be Obama’s first, and most critical, challenge.  While the Europeans can be a bit recalcitrant I think they ultimately want, and will more willingly follow, a strong, rational U.S. foreign policy.  In fact, I think Europeans will be pretty desperate for it.

There seems to be quite a lot of talk about Iran this election and for good reason.  We haven’t exactly been best buds for awhile and they’ve been planning to rearrange the furniture in their neighborhood for awhile.  Of course, the fact that they’ve got a guy in power who may, or may not, be ‘cuckoo for cocoa puffs‘.

There’s been a lot of hand wringing, saber rattling, and general predictions of doom and gloom if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon.  While I agree it isn’t our desired end state, allow me to present a contrarin view…

First, it’s not like we can do a whole lot about it in the first place.  They learned quite well from the Israeli strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor.  They spread out their facilities and built in redundancies.  At best we could delay their effort and piss them off in the process.

Second, let’s not forget that Iran of 2008 is not the Iran of 1979.  All revolutions, once they come to power, moderate and maintance of power becomes their primary concern.  The French, Soviets and Chinese had some pretty crazy ideas when their revolutions took over and within 30 years had settled into fairly conventional nation states (not necessarily ones I would want to live in but that’s another issue).  Yes, the Iranians cling to their revolutionary rhetoric but it’s not at all clear that they aren’t doing the same thing.  Hold onto power and try to further your national goals.

Third, it would be dangerous to assume that the Iranian leadership is irrational.  Just because they do (and say) things we don’t like doesn’t mean they’re crazy.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be crazy or he may be stiring the pot and saying outrageous things about Israel for his domestic audience in order to boost up his approval and take their minds off of the fact that in face of $100 a barrel oil, they still aren’t making great headway economically.  Also, it’s not like Ahmadinejad is the supreme leader of Iran and can make his word law.  He may want to bomb Iran all day long but there would have to be a whole host of others in the government who agree with him before such an action could happen.

Fourth, look at Iran’s position.  On their eastern border are about 70,000 troops (U.S. and non-Afghan coalition) and on their western border are over 140,000 U.S. soldiers.  The U.S. has been a hostile power since the revolution in 1979 and ever since the end of ‘major’ combat operations in Iraq there’s been talk about hooking a right turn and taking Tehran.

So, is it really that irrational to try to get a nuclear bomb?  Everyone knows that is the ultimate game changer.  And a small number of bombs is a defensive move.  Let’s say Iran gets 1, 5 or even a dozen bombs.  What does it do with them?  Unless you assume that Iran is headed by a Hitler-esqe (or Joker-esqe if you’re tired of Hitler analogies) freak who just wants to destroy the world, there’s no way you’d contimplate a nuclear strike against Israel.  Even if you were to throw out the notion of American retaliation, it’s a widely held belief that Israel holds 100-200 nuclear weapons.  It would be the very definition of Mutually Assured Destruction.

So what would a few weapons get you?  A guarantee that the U.S. won’t invade.  Increased prestige and a seat at the regional (and perhaps international) table.  I suspect these are the things Iran really wants.

In order to be an offensive weapon, Iran would need to develop a first strike capability which would limit or eliminate Israel’s ability to retaliate.  Given the distances and capabilities of Israel such an attempt is likely to end up as fruitless as the attempts by the U.S. and Soviets during the cold war.

So I generally agree with this article by Bob Baer:

I myself think a deal can be cut with Iran. During the last 30 years, Iran has gone from a terrorist, revolutionary power to far more rational, calculating regional hegemon. Its belligerence today has more to do with a weakened United States and Israel than with any plans to start World War III.

If we want to have any hope of influencing Iran in the future we going to have to engage with them.  This idiotic idea we seem to have gotten that by somehow ignoring countries we don’t like will result in them running back to us, begging to give them just one more chance is ridiculous.

I’m convinced that our adherence to that policy has done more to keep tyrants in power (see Cuba, Iran, Syria, Lybia, Venezuela, etc.) than Soviet subsidies, radical Islam or expensive oil ever could.

So let’s cut the crap and start using some soft power…

Ah, nothing like narrow minded ideologes to bring down our financial system.  It appears a number of our fine representatives are willing to sacrifice our livelyhoods in order to protect us from…SOCIALISM!!!  Horrors!!

From the NY Times:

Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican, said he was “resolute” in his opposition to the measure because it would betray party principles and amount to “a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.”

Hey, thanks Darrell!  You’re right, I (and millions like me) will be more than happy to stand on the bread line so that we can honor the memory of Ronald Reagan.  After all, you can’t make an omlete without breaking some eggs.

Idiot!

And as an aside, am I the only one thinking that Bin Laden and the Islamists are feeling totally vindicated right now?  While I think this has nothing to do with them, I can see how they’ll spin it.  Just like the Soviets, we invaded a Muslim country and faced economic ruin.  This was, after all, their plan.  Draw us into war(s) and then bleed us dry financially.